Web services: when to use SOAP or HTTP nodes
HTTP and SOAP nodes can both be used to interact with web services. Typically you use SOAP nodes when working with SOAP-based web services.
For SOAP-based web services, several advantages
exist if you use the SOAP nodes and the SOAP message domain instead
of the HTTP transport nodes and XMLNSC message domain.
- Support for WS-Addressing, WS-Security and SOAP headers.
- A common SOAP logical tree format, independent of the bitstream format.
- Runtime checking against WSDL.
- Automatic processing of SOAP with Attachments (SwA).
- Automatic processing of Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM).
Cases where it might be better to use HTTP nodes include:
- Message flows that interact with web services that use different standards, such as REST or XML-RPC.
- Message flows that never use WS-Addressing, WS-Security, SwA, or MTOM.